In a move to introduce exciting new offers to its customers, Etisalat’s ‘More’ loyalty rewards program has teamed up with Cobone to provide them with daily deals and more ways to gain more value.

This is being introduced as a new feature on Etisalat’s ‘More’ Rewards website, giving ‘More’ loyalty program members the opportunity to make significant savings as well as gain ‘More’ reward points when visiting the site for “special deals”. The deals on the exclusive site are powered by Cobone’s deal-of-the-day platform.

This is an interesting move for Cobone, who it seems have worked on some redevelopment and redesign to be able to support such integration, to expand their reach beyond their site and onto partner sites and platforms such as the Etisalat one.

As part of the INJAZ Egypt Company Program in 2011, over 1000 university students from across Egypt have formed start-up companies. On Saturday, September 24th, the top 500 of those students, organized in 22 teams from 11 Egyptian universities, will be taking part in a trade fair and will be competing for 10 seed funds plus incubation from corporations such as Mobinil, Exxon Mobil and Abraaj at “Dare to Dream: Empowering Egypt’s Young Entrepreneurs 2011“.

The “Dare to Dream” competition is an annual one that is organized by INJAZ Egypt; This year’s edition is sponsored by Mobinil, and will be held at the American University of Cairo.

The 10 winning teams/companies will receive a share of the 285,000 LE (around $US47,000) contributed by the adopting companies. The startups will also be mentored by their adopting corporation to get legally registered and become financially sound, profitable and sustainable.

Oasis500, the MENA region focused early stage and seed investment program, has announced two new investment deals for Jordanian startup companies Dakwak and Masmoo3 from its first Angel Investment event, and that the program has also signed a partnership agreement with Akhtaboot.

Dakwak, the startup behind a tool that enables websites to translate their content into over 60 languages, and which was previously reviewed here, received an investment from IV Holdings, resulting in a 300% increase in the Company’s post money valuation.
Dakwak was launched in July 2010 by Waheed Barghouthi, and was incubated by Oasis500 in March 2011. Waheed Barghouthi is currently CTO at the company, with fellow techie Zaid Amireh in the CEO role.

In this online world we’re living in, we’ve all received one too many annoying spam emails in our inboxes, and we’ve all been in front of a subscription form, at one point or another, scratching our heads, thinking if whatever service we’re signing up to is worth the ton of spam “marketing” emails we’re going to be receiving after it.

Other than spam filters that have varying degrees of effectiveness, another nuisance email fighting tool is the use of a disposable email address, that you just use for that one purpose and that you can dispose of later to avoid getting any unwanted emails.

Mohmal is a pretty similar Arabic service, that enables users to quickly create a disposable email address, that temporarily lives and receives emails for 45 minutes and is then deleted.

The King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST) has announced the setup of a new fund, a first of its kind in Saudi Arabia, to finance small and medium technological firms, according to a report by Arab News.

KACST’s Badir Technology Incubator signed a cooperation agreement with The Investor for Securities Co., a boutique investment banking firm, to set up the fund. The agreement was signed by Prince Turki bin Saud, vice president for research institutes, and Abdullah Al-Fowzan, chairman of The Investor for Securities Co..

In a statement on the occasion, Muhammad Al-Suwaiyel, president of KACST, said the agreement would boost the Kingdom’s technological development.

Online services that push us to check-in and share the places we’re at, what we’re doing, what we’re eating, what we’re watching and pretty much every other daily activity we could possibly be engaged in are all around us these days, urging us to over-share our every single move with the world, in many cases for nothing but the sake of over-sharing.

CareZone is a new check-in service that aims to make a difference and add purpose, by creating a link between users’ check-ins and spending at different places on one hand, and channeling benefits to those in need on the other.

The platform offers a location-based mobile app that suggests and rewards users for choosing and checking in at a CareZone partner (shops, restaurants, …etc.) Users earn CareZone Coins for their check-ins; spending money at the CareZone partner’s business will earn them even more Coins.

In a press release, the company stated that a group of Arab and Foreign angel investors invested in its technical capabilities and future visions aiming at developing a full-fledged mobile advertising platform and mobile media monetization solutions targeting the massive mobile growth in the Middle East.

This first round of investment is aimed at providing the company with the required liquidity to enhance its capabilities, boost its growth, and attract the needed skills and competences to meet the increasing demand on its mobile media solutions.

Mizalla; a Lebanese online services, marketing, and retailing company; has launched a new online shopping mall site, that gathers various retailers offering hundreds of brands and products under one platform.

At this initial stage, the products available on the site are mainly electronics (cameras, home theatre televisions, software, laptops, scanners, computers …etc.), but the plan is to incorporate additional categories on a monthly basis to include items like books, clothing apparel, kitchenware, cosmetics and more.

Mizalla, which means Umbrella, aims to provide shoppers, the main focus being Lebanese shoppers at this point, with a comprehensive solution that enables them to easily search for products from different brands, compare them, order online and get them shipped as quickly as possible, all from the comfort of their homes or offices.

Qaym, the Arab website for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was previously reviewed here, and recently received an investment from N2V, is announcing the launch of their iPhone application.

The online service enables users to rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.

The newly released iPhone application provides users with the following features:

A list of the best ten restaurants in the city they’re in, based on the ratings of its users.

The possibility to drill down and find the best restaurants in the city by category or type of cuisine.

Access to the restaurants’ Qaym profiles that show the ratings, reviews and photos that other users who visited it shared and uploaded.

This first version of the application supports the following cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, Manama, Dammam, Khobar, Medina, Buraidah, Unaizah and Mecca. But more cities are planned for future releases of the application.

An Android version of the application is underway, and should see the light of day soon too.

The application is available in Arabic only, and can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store here.

Logta the online service that provides shoppers with a one-stop shop for promotions, that was previously covered here, has expanded and released what they’re describing as an online mall.

They’ve gone ahead and launched a new section under their portal called Logta Mall, with a wide range of online stores for a number of retailers covering various sectors and offering their products for sale online through Logta’s new platform.

So to build up towards a B2C model, Logta’s sales team get in touch and work with a variety of retailers in order to put together partnerships, through which Logta sets stores for them on the platform with all the products they want to put up for sale, and then handle all the order processing, online payments and shipping follow-up.